Mad Magazine Poster # 1 Toilet Train Your Dog by Don Martin

Description

Mad Magazine Poster # 1 Toilet Train Your Dog by Don Martin

Don Martin (1931 – 2000) was an American cartoonist whose best-known work was published in Mad from 1956 to 1988. His popularity and prominence were such that the magazine promoted Martin as “Mad’s Maddest Artist.”

Martin often was billed as “Mad’s Maddest Artist.” Whereas other features in Mad, recurring or otherwise, typically were headed with pun-filled “department” titles, Martin’s work always was headed with only his name—”Don Martin Dept.” — further fanfare presumably being unnecessary.

At his peak, each issue of Mad typically carried three Martin strips of one or two pages each. But Martin also did several longer pieces, including parodies of poems by writers like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Edgar Guest and Clement Clarke Moore, thematic collections of gags on a single subject such as Moses, superheroes or Dracula, as well as full parodies of the Gentle Ben TV series and the films Excalibur and Conan the Barbarian. He also drew some insert bonus material for “Mad Specials” such as stickers and posters.

Although Martin’s contributions invariably featured outrageous events and sometimes outright violations of the laws of space-time, his strips typically had unassuming generic titles such as “A Quiet Day in the Park” or “One Afternoon at the Beach.” The six-panel “The Impressionist” features a bull who becomes a famous artist by smearing an outdoor painter against his canvas and displaying his remains as an abstract design. The four-panel “One Night in the Miami Bus Terminal” presents a man who approaches a machine labeled “Change,” inserts a dollar bill, and changes to a woman. In another gag, a man is flattened by a steamroller but is saved by the intervention of two passersby, who fold him as a paper airplane and throw him to the nearest hospital.

Near mint condition. Ships folded.